Three Views on Christianity and Science

By: Michael Ruse, Alister E. McGrath, Bruce L. Gordon, Zondervan, Paul Copan - editor, Christopher L. Reese - editor

Narrated by: Tom Parks

When it comes to relating Christianity to modern Western culture, perhaps no topic is more controversial than the relationship between Christianity and science.

Outside the church, the myth of an age-old conflict between science and Christianity is nearly ubiquitous in popular culture and can poison the well before a fruitful dialogue can begin. Within the church, opposing viewpoints on the relation between Christianity and science often lead to division and rancor.

Three Views on Christianity and Science addresses both types of conflict. Featuring leading evangelical representatives, it presents three primary options for the compatibility of Christianity and science and models constructive dialogue on the surrounding controversial issues.

The highlighted contributors and their views are:

• Michael Ruse, Independence View--When functioning correctly, science and Christian theology operate independently of each other, seeking answers to different questions through different means.
• Alister McGrath, Dialogue View--Though the natural sciences and Christian philosophy and theology function differently, they can and should inform each other.
• Bruce L. Gordon, Constrained Integration View--Science, philosophy, and theology all contribute to our understanding of reality. Their interactions constrain each other and together present an optimally coherent and integrated picture of reality.

By engaging with the viewpoints of the contributors, listeners will come away with a deeper understanding of the compatibility of science and Christianity, as well as of the positions of those who disagree with them. Scholars, students, pastors, and interested laypeople will be able to make use of this material in research, assignments, sermons and lessons, evangelism, and apologetics.

Excellent narration and well written essays

The well thought out topics and questions framed at the outset of this Counterpoints volume, by author Paul Copan, ensured that the contributors fully articulated, enumerated and reduced the opaqueness of their positions in relation to key issues. Two views (Independence and Integration) are well represented and defended by Michael Ruse and Bruce Gordon, respectively, whereas Alister McGrath who seemingly leans towards Independence himself, encourages optimism about finding elusive middle ground, by proposing the creation of conceptual space for the Dialogue between Christianity and Science. Overall, this is an intellectually stimulating work leaving the reader/listener with lots to ponder about. The narration was very well done.